Herbert Hoover’s Despairing Verve

Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath, edited by George H. Nash (Hoover Institution Press, 920 pp., $49.95)

Neville Chamberlain and Stanley Baldwin were men of “intellectual integrity” and “respect for the rights of others”—in marked contrast to Winston Churchill, a demagogue with “only one goal: to save the [British] Empire from the Hitlerian danger.” The now-forgotten General Robert E. Wood, chairman of the short-lived America First Committee—which campaigned to keep the United States out of World War II—“made a grand fight” and would be vindicated by history, whereas the “madman” and “egoist” Franklin Roosevelt lied his countrymen into an unnecessary and catastrophic war, betraying American constitutional liberty while fecklessly handing over millions of human beings to Communist tyranny.

These were the considered views not only of John Birchers, radical libertarians, and others of the sort William F. Buckley, Jr. consigned to the conservative movement’s fever swamps, but of Herbert Hoover—the rational and benevolent statesman who served at the American government’s highest levels and who spearheaded humanitarian efforts after both world wars that probably saved more human lives than any others before or since. It is perhaps understandable that Hoover’s heirs suppressed the manuscript he rightly called his “magnum opus” until a few months ago, when his preeminent biographer, George H. Nash, brought it to the light of publication.

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